I am interested in using my court reporting skills to turn the spoken word into the written word for the deaf and hard of hearing community. I can take the words of speakers and put into a written speech by accessing online from my home.

I would enjoy working in a ward with the deaf community as a volunteer. My great grandfather is George D. Watt who traveled with the brethren in Brigham Young's day and took down the speeches in shorthand, then transcribed them into the written word, later publishing those speeches as the Journal of Discourses. An article named "Lost Sermons" featured Brother Watt in the December 2013 Ensign. I would like to follow in his footsteps by serving the church in some capacity using my shorthand skills.

If you go to https://www.lds.org/maps/ and search for "Sign Language" you can see several sign language wards in the United States. You may be able to find one near you – you can try calling the number for the bishop or branch president and see if there are any needs you can help with...

If you get anywhere with this request, I'd like to know. I'm a closed captioner in Canada and would like to caption broadcasts that are not to the general membership, which are already captioned (like General Conf. this weekend). We have an upcoming country-wide stake conference broadcast that I hope will be captioned by someone!

From what I've seen, all broadcasts from SLC, even ones for stake conference, are captioned. I believe they have a professional team at SLC. I would keep an eye on service missionary opportunities in case they open that up.

Where the volunteers might be useful is to work with the stakes doing webcasts. How that would work, I don't know. But due to time delays, I would guess they'd need to somehow inject the captioning at the display device and not try to encode it at transmission time.

Have you searched the Help Center? Try doing a Google search and adding "site:churchofjesuschrist.org/help" to the search criteria.

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I will keep your note in mind. At this point, I don't have any further info to share. I am just glad to see that the captioning for conference has improved in the last couple of years. It was awful for awhile! Good luck to you in your endeavor! I think the idea of doing this as a 'service missionary' is a good one, but I don't know where to go from there as these are not usually self-initiated. Marsha Marcom